Detachment 41, Part One

My gang for Dark Future, or at least my first one, is going to be Detachment 41, a branch of the Ontario Peace Patrol sanc-op. (Well I say sanc-op, but it's basically a government organization.)

Detachment 41 is a small branch of the OPP, tasked with patrolling a long stretch of rural highways along the 401 corridor. Not a glamorous assignment. They receive little in the way of support or funding, and live in perpetual unease for the day Superintendent Lee might come for an inspection.

In my Dark Future, Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart runs Ontario (Upper Canada, to be precise). I tried to find out what his favourite car is, but he's more of a motorcycle guy. Even so, whenever a car and Neil Peart are mentioned together, it tends to be a roadster. I love roadsters too, and the colour scheme I  already had in mind - the official colours of Ontario, green and gold-  reminded me of a certain Hot Wheels car: the Rrroadster.

Last year the Rrroadster was sold in green/yellow and silver green. This year in blue and orange. I wasn't expecting to be able to find any green ones, but happily did. Here they are before work.

According to the packaging, the Rrroadster was created in 2013 in El Segundo California, and sports a 5.0L supercharged V8 spitting out 1100hp. Well. That all has to go.

The fiction wasn't all that had to go. The numbers had to go, and that left big dull scuffs, so I decided to scuff the rest of the cars up, take their shine off, kick them around a bit. The gold stripe was added with a sharpie and masking tape.

Flash picks out the bare metal. I tried to beat up each car a little differently, to give them some character. Maybe that one sideswiped someone recently, maybe the other rams people a lot, maybe the driver of the other spills a lot of gas.

I'm very pleased with the stripe, and the overall look. And the fact that I even found all three of these cars on my first day looking. I didn't get the tape down perfect in every spot, as you can see, but it came out so well that now I'm thinking about completely repainting these cars. The gold looks so good, and while I like the beat up look, the green looks kind of awful, by comparison. I also want to try and add some weathering effects. Ontario may not turn into a dusty wasteland in Dark Future, but I think some roadsalt stains would be a very Canadian touch.

Now that the paint's been changed, let's look at some replacement fiction for this car that never could have been made in Dark Future.

Most of the vehicles driven by the Ontario Peace Patrol are locally produced within the Protectorate of Upper Canada, and are based on a vehicle acquired by Lord Protector Peart's agents during the Detroit-Windsor war.

The Juno, once lovingly hand crafted by a small team of Canadian artists working for the specialty car manufacturer Beacon-Mitchell, became the basis of the OPP's highway enforcement following the war. Originally built in small numbers during Canada's economic ascendancy during the '70s, the Juno was a powerful sport roadster, more at home on the track than the road.

After things fell apart, Beacon-Mitchell stopped producing cars, dwindling to little more than a repair shop. Located in Windsor and under constant threat from the south, the small company agreed to relocate to Toronto during the Detroit-Windsor war.

With much of their specialty equipment and materials impossible to replace, Beacon-Mitchell now produces a much cheaper version of the Juno for use by Protectorate forces. Typically cheap, built light so that smaller engines can do more with the car, the Juno serves as the workhorse of the Ontario Peace Patrol. Most are fitted for pursuit duty with the VP6, a Beacon-Mitchell-made 2.4L V6 engine. A small handful have turbocharges as well, and there are even rarer Junos that have been hand-tuned by Lord Protector Peart's chief mechanic himself; a Serbian-born genius named Zivo.

Even in their original configuration, the Juno never would have been any use in Canada of old, with its long, harsh winters and icy, snow-buried highways. But as the environment as become harsher and warmer, and snow and ice scarce, the Juno has become a symbol of Lord Protector Peart's power.

The Junos of Detachment 41 are driven by Constables Jacob, the unit's sharpshooter; Red, the resident daredevil; and Echo, an OPP rookie and newest addition to the unit.

A Brief History of the Dark North

Since I'm Canadian, and I love my country, the best thing I could do for it was to ruin the hell out of it in the name of Dark Future. What follows is a brief overview of where things are in Canada in 1995, at least in the areas I'll be operating in. There's a lot of work to be done, especially in getting from the '70s to 1995, but I'll probably fill things out as I need them.


A Brief History of Canada

As global trade broke down, the States began looking to Canada more and more for oil. This created a period of economic ascendancy for Canada, under Prime Minister Trudeau. But it couldn't last, and Canada entered a stark depression, into which the social reforms taking place in the south found a perfect breeding ground.

Trudeau was remembered for his extreme excesses, on which the country was ready to blame their growing list of problems, and things began to change in Canada, as the country began adopting changes they saw in their neighbours to the south. Rock and roll was banned.  Objectivist philosophers became increasingly popular. The Private Peacekeeping Act was passed.

As things broke down further, Canada's position as a country became tenuous. Oil-rich Alberta turned to China when the US stopped buying, arming itself with Chinese weapons in the process, and shortly thereafter declared itself sovereign. But when continued trade with China became difficult, Alberta began selling to interests in the US again, establishing a heavily patrolled border to the south to ensure their trade routes remained open and unmolested.

Quebec was quick to follow Alberta’s lead, taking another huge portion of Canada's natural wealth with it.

Ontario began to fracture under the strain, with Toronto not seeing a point in Ottawa any longer. Under the philospher-turned-politician, Neil Peart, Southern and Eastern Ontario seceded from Canada.

Lord Protector Peart declared Toronto the new capital, and his protectorate the "true" north. The new Protectorate of Upper Canada was quick to arm itself against southern invasion and reprisals out of Ottawa. Several short, brutal wars were fought in southern Ontario, along the old American border. The fighting was fiercest at the Detroit-Windsor crossing, ultimately leaving much of the production capacity there useless, but providing Upper Canada with enough raw material and spoils of war to outfit its own para-military force: the Ontario Peace Patrol.

As Lake Ontario dried up, decades of industrial slag and waste were revealed, providing a new resource to exploit as the waste of yesterday became the mines of tomorrow. With Niagara Falls running dry, power became a serious problem for Upper Canada, and is still strictly rationed outside of the Toronto PZ.

The Toronto core became a heavily guarded PZ, with the Greater Toronto Area essentially being left as it was. The GTA began attracting people from across the new protectorate, fearing as they did more war coming up from the south, or from Quebec. They wanted safety, and the GTA offered that, at least from outside forces.

While other, more high-class state forces guard the citizens of Toronto, the Ontario Peace Patrol ranges across Upper Canada, from the Niagara grow-ups in the south, to the lakebed mines, up the 401 even as far as Ottawa itself, though they never act to help the former capital.

Ottawa, meanwhile, became a battleground. Qubecois separatists wanted to annex it for Quebec, staunch Federalists wanted to keep it as the capital of Canada, and resurgent Loyalists (an oft-used term, in Ottawa) supported the idea that Britain would, somehow, solve all of Canada’s problems.

Today, Ottawa retains a tenuous relationship with the rest of Canada. While still nominally a country, Canada is broken up by independent nations. Quebec separates most of Canada from the Maritimes, who themselves are subject to piratical raids on their oil reserves; the Free Metis Nation controls much of southern Manitoba; Native bands have declared dozens of nations across the country; Alberta stands on its own, Saskatchewan is a flat and dusty canvas for brutal motorized gang wars; BC is isolated by the Rockies, but deals with the remnants of a large influx of Asian gangs and American predation; the North has become a country almost unto itself. With the environment ruined, the ice melting, and government protection a thing of the past, the north has become easier than ever to exploit, resulting in new oil wells and mines popping up everywhere, along with a lucrative trade in freshwater. Diamonds from northern mines have become so common they have formed a kind of currency in the north, a new gold dust, and while Ottawa still officially endorses the loonie as the national currency, many across the nation just use the new, diamond standard.

In Alberta, the oil wells have become heavily guarded, walled cities. The Albertan oil forts are among the most well defended sites in all of Canada, and while Albertan PZs are protected by a powerful army, they sometimes suffer raids. Not so, the heavily defended oil forts.

Due to the isolation of the oil forts, Alberta required a force to patrol the lanes between them, resulting in the creation of the Alberta Rangers. Equipped with powerful muscle cars of Chinese make - modern reproductions of older American cars - these brutal lawmen go where sanc-ops don't, keeping the Albertan wilds some semblance of safe.

The claim to the True North is now a disputed one, with Canada fracturing under the grim pressures of the dark future.